I think the way Bethesda is handling it hurts everyone on the business side of gaming. It makes it difficult to play the game and write a timely review in a marketplace that is desperately driven by first week sales and hype. It makes it difficult to sell a game to people who really only know things about it based on preview coverage that frankly shouldn’t be making any solid value judgments on an unfinished product, thus hurting the publisher’s initial sell-in. It hurts the developers because there is a very real possibility, as the article notes, that rushed reviews won’t dig into the game in any meaningful way and Metacritic bonuses may be lost.
Now that last one might be something the publisher wants to happen?
The only people not really hurt are gamers, who can just wait and see what the guinea pigs think or wait for reviews that come much later after reputable publications can play the game.
Think back to a game like Black and White. If you didn’t take the time to play it, you got a review like the one that sank CGW’s reviewer. If you DID take the time to dig in, you got Steve Bauman’s review that found a completely busted game after the opening scenes that tricked you into thinking it worked.
There’s a balance somewhere in the middle here, and Bethesda doesn’t seem to want to find it.
Because they used Metacritic as an argument to authority. When Metacritic is a far smaller site and less important than Kotaku itself. Its like the supreme court invoking Judge Judy. I mean, you can do it, its just weird.
I have no problem with Kotaku, or the piece or you linking it. I was interested! Its fine. Its just on that one point times have changed, no major publisher gives a damn about metacritic anymore and as far as I know (and I know a lot of folks) zero of the major publishers attach bonuses to metacritic any more.
How and when metacritic became irrelevant to games makers is probably a longer argument, worthy of a good bit of journalism actually, but roughly it was probably mobile that finally did it in. The dollars went there and pro review aggregators couldn’t follow.
I have no clue. Personally I have no love for Metacritic for a variety of reasons, so it being discarded would suit me just fine. However, it is still a major site. Poking in the 1000 range, as it is, does make it one of the most popular websites in the video game ecosystem, with all the implications that has. But it has more pull than most gaming sites aside from Kotaku. It easily crushes Polygon, Escapist, RPS, etc.
But I see the argumet you were making now, that Kotaku using Metacritic as an appeal to authority makes no sense. But I don’t see it that way. Up until recently it seemed like Metacritic was important to publishers for reasons. Bad reasons, mostly I’d say, but reasons still. So it didn’t strike me as odd to invoke Metacritic in the discussion of why their policy was bad for Bethesda.
Keep in mind that Bethesda was literally one of the publishers that we knew used Metacritic as the basis for bonus payments.
Whether or not that true with Arkane and Prey is an important point (especially since ZeniMax outright owns Arkane) but it’s still a valid thing to remember that Bethesda has this history.
Andrew Wilson’s answer to what happened at Popcap:
[quote]
In terms of PopCap, again, I think there’s a couple of different reasons for PopCap. We have an amazing PopCap team in Vancouver that built Garden Warfare 1 and 2 on console. That game continues to do extremely well. High critical acclaim, strong engagement, and strong sales over its life, so we’re very happy with that team. The team’s building against mobile games out of Seattle, recognize that the market continues to change, that brands are really important in the mobile space, but so is focus.
And the notion of building lots of small things really doesn’t pay out the way it does in mobile like it did just a few years ago. And their decision was to refocus and really energize around a few core PopCap IP and that drove a slight change in structure there. But you shouldn’t read into anything other than we are very, very committed to PopCap and very committed to PopCap IP, and very committed to bringing that wonderful IP to players across [multiple] devices in the future.[/quote]
IGN and Kotaku sure seem terrified of GameSnacksWeekly.
I don’t know much about the business side of reviewing – but does the “brand” of IGN and Kotaku not protect them in some way? It doesn’t fit with the way I go about finding reviews – I go to websites I know and look up reviews for the game that way. Do a large number of people just cruise google for “prey review” and click sites they’ve never heard of?
Did you link to the correct thing? Your quote isn’t on that page.
Those people don’t read the article or are interested in the review, they just come here to tell Tom that he’s wrong and that their favourite game is OBJECTIVELY worth at least an 8, not a 3. (Even though QT3 uses a 5 star system)
I do that more often than I go to a specific site. One, there’s no guarantee that any particular game will get reviewed by a site. Ex: USgamer, eurogamer. Two, it’s not always easy to find a review unless you catch it when it first gets posted. Ex: Kotaku, ign. Three, I don’t think there’s any current site that has a consistent voice that I trust, and some that prioritize being condescending over discussing game stuff. Ex: Polygon, kotaku again. So why not spin the wheel?
I like outlier reviews. If I’m pondering a game and looking for a bit more info, I find it useful to check for a review that’s outside the norm. Sometimes yeah, it’s just axe-grinding or ass-kissing, but then sometimes you’ll find that angle that nobody else really covered.
Yeah exactly. The site I ended up writing for years ago I only came across because it was one of the few sites listed on Metacritic that didn’t blow its wad all over GTA IV. I bloody despised that game and to this day it still blows my mind that it’s sat at 98/100. Anyway, yeah, I need outliers and dissenting voices. I can’t remember how I discovered Qt3 but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t through Metacritic.
Well, that’s what I use metacritic for. Got to Metacritic, find my game, look through the list of the critic reviews for RPS/Eurogamer/QT3 etc, open them all in a new tab. I don’t think the vast majority of review readers (consumers, really) give a damn about an individual outlet/reviewer’s voice, though, unfortunately.
Not that many interesting voices out there these days. Still, folks say gaming doesn’t have its own Roger Ebert but I enjoy Tom’s stuff in exactly the same way I enjoyed Ebert’s. I didn’t always agree with Ebert’s movie reviews and I don’t think I actually ended up seeing all that many movies based on his recommendations. I just liked what he had to say and the way he said it. He was interesting. And that’s pretty much how I feel about Tom. Jeez, I guess that sounds all kiss-ass, I’m bailing out.
Metacritic is now orders of magnitude less useful than Steam Reviews due to the sheer volume. When you’re seeing sample sizes of tens of thousands even critic reviews seem unimportant. Especially when aggregate critical reception of games seems increasingly disconnected from player reception of certain games or genres which don’t review well if at all.
When I’m looking at something on Amazon and it has a crapload of five star reviews, I always read the one and two star reviews first. Then I get a feeling for whether the item has actual failings or the reviewers just couldn’t figure out how to use it.
